The Plea Bargaining Blog

The Daily Press in southeastern Virginia released an article yesterday detailing its review of court records related to plea deals in the Hampton Roads circuit courts. According to the article, the newspaper found racial disparities in the outcomes of cases. In particular, the article states that the data examined indicates that, for some of the most commonly charged offenses, white defendants were more likely to receive a deal that did not include jail time as compared to African-American defendants. A few examples of the data discussed in the article: "Whites were able to negotiate plea bargains on charges of drug possession that resulted in no actual jail time in 65 percent of cases, compared to 56 percent for African-Americans." "In plea deals on charges of distributing drugs, whites received no time in jail in 48 percent of their plea agreements, compared to 22 percent for African-Americans. All but a handful of these cases involved people who had been before ...

Readers might be interested in a new article I have just posted to SSRN entitled "Voices on Innocence."  The piece, written with several colleagues from around the country, contains a number of essays on the topic.  In my introduction to the work, I discuss my plea bargaining research and the importance of the innocence issue to the field.   The abstract for the article is below.  The piece, which will appear in the Florida Law Review  later this year, is available for free download here . Abstract:        Voices on Innocence , 68 Florida Law Review -- (forthcoming) (with Richard A. Leo, Meghan J. Ryan, Valena E. Beety, Gregory M. Gilchrist, and William W. Berry III).  In the sum mer of 2015, experts gathered from around the country to sit together and discuss one of the most pressing and important issues facing the American criminal justice system – innocence. Innocence is an issue that pervades various areas...